Understanding Climate Change

Climatic Changes
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Introduction
In the last few decades, the world has seen several manifestations of the climatic changes menace play out with catastrophic results (Klein, 2015). Heat waves have become more frequent much like floods and fogs among others. Ironically very few efforts have been put in place that actually captures the gravity of the situation. Much of the policies that have devised in the repetitive global meeting have been half-baked and elementally flawed in design and intentions. While a good majority of the population understand and appreciate the severity of the situation at the moment, most of the people are hooked onto the consumerism lifestyle, without much care of their actions to the environment. The truth is, most of the efforts have been taken after calamities strike and soon after people forget it ever happened and they move on with their normal habits as if in mockery of the climatic changes (Weart, 2009).
Flawed Projections
The general notion that climatic changes are linear and thus predictable is one on the main reasons as to why most of the efforts that are geared towards averting the dangers of the same are poorly implemented. As Naomi Klein, points out in her book, This changes Everything Capitalism vs. The Climate, most of the projections that exist presume that climatic changes relative to the changes in the greenhouse gas emissions, temperature increases and the rising sea levels are incremental (Klein, 2015). Ideally most of the projections indicate that there is a gradual and slow change in the climate element relative to an increase of the contributing factors. According to these flawed projection, certain amounts of greenhouse gases are expected to give rise to predictable changes in the climate elements such as temperature change in degrees Fahrenheit (Klein, 2015).
However, this is not the case as geological records on climatic changes indicate a different approach, indicating a flaw in the existing projections. Small changes in one of the elements of the climate can lead to abrupt and unpredictable contrary to the projected smooth and predictable changes. This means that when the climatic system is pushed past certain limits, the ability to predict what could happen next is lost in the catastrophic chain of events that follow (Klein, 2015). At this point or stage, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will not help revert the system to its original state as it steers away like car with brakes and steering malfunctions. This is to mean that, once the consequences are set in motion there is not a remedial action that can be used to stop them.
The climatic models play a subtle role in the current policy development, mainly because they are taken to the principal basis for the assessment of the anthropogenic climatic effects. Ironically these models are flawed and so are the intervention to counter the climatic changes and effects. The more precise knowledge about climatic changes come from two elements (Weart, 2009). One of the main sources of information is earth’s paleoclimate records; this basically means ancient climatic information relative to records on responses to changes to climatic forcing and th...